Stanley Kubrick phoned Ridley Scott to find out how he did chestburster scene in Alien

Last Updated on November 29, 2023

Ridley Scott has staged some incredible scenes in his 45+-year career: the duel in his debut The Duellists, the opening shot of Blade Runner, Maximus’ reveal in Gladiator…But the one that stands above all others just might be the chestburster scene from 1979’s Alien, a scene so unique in all of cinema that not even Stanley Kubrick could figure out how it was accomplished.

As Ridley Scott told Deadline, “I talked to Stanley twice. First time, I’d just done Alien, and the office says, Stanley Kubrick is calling. I said, holy f*ck. He says, hi there. Listen, I just watched your movie. I need to ask you a question and I’ll get straight to it. How do you get that thing coming out of his goddamn chest? He said, it scared the sh*t out of me. That was the first exchange. I said, well, what I did, put him under the table very impractical, made an artificial fiberglass chest, screwed the table, put a T-shirt on, raised bit so it would break.” And while the effect blew Kubrick away, his response to the achievement’s behind-the-scenes secrets was rather muted. “He said, I got you. I got you. I got you.”

Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick have a few important links, with another come after the release of The Shining when Scott was making Blade Runner. Not surprisingly, the studio wanted the film to have a more uplifting ending, so Scott asked for unused helicopter footage from Kubrick’s film.

And of course Stanley Kubrick once tried to get a movie about Napoleon going after 2001: A Space Odyssey, a task he made so monumentally epic and difficult that his obsessive research and the storied production were featured in a nearly 3,000-page book from Taschen. Instead, His next films would be A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, which itself was a visual influence on Scott’s The Duellists.

While Stanley Kubrick never made Napoleon, Ridley Scott has directed his own — much to the dismay of French critics. Hey, maybe Stanley got spared…

Where does the chestburster scene from Alien rank in the all-time great movie scenes? How about in Ridley Scott’s oeuvre? Let us know your rankings below!